STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. - When imported photographers arrive in war zones, they’re at a disadvantage. They won’t see what an insider or native sees. And without the culture or language, interpreting what they see becomes risky.

New Brighton-based photographer Sriyantha Walpola, whose “War and Peace in Sri Lanka” is up at the St. George Library this month, was an eyewitness in his embattled native land (formerly known as Ceylon) until 2006, when he came to this country.

He covered the protracted civil war that pitted the Tamil Tigers, credentialled terrorists seeking to “liberate” two northern provinces, against the elected government. The dispute started in 1983. A cease-fire agreement was signed in 2002. Hostilities resumed several years later, but the insurgent Tigers finally conceded defeat just 15 months ago.

Walpola’s photographs have appeared in Indian and Sri Lankan outlets, the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, ABC’s “Frontline” and BBC online.

His insider status gives him access and insight. When he shoots a wide, mistily atmospheric body of water with a single fisherman, gilded in the light of a full lemon-yellow moon, the composition reads like a beauty shot, a timeless South Asian idyll that looked exactly like this 1,000 years ago.

Nice, but that’s not what’s there at all. It’s a war-related image, actually. The location is the Jaffna lagoon in the north of the island, where fishing had been banned — due to shooting — for 20 years. The fisherman’s presence suggests that normalcy is returning to the area.

All kinds of different people are on the boat. His caption: “After the cease-fire, people from different communities and faiths were traveling together to a Christian festival at the Katchchativa islet, which had been closed because of fighting.

He composes his images in the well-proven tradition of news photography. Legibility, information and drama are prime considerations.

He shoots the combat tool set — mines, rockets and bombs — in a straightforward fashion most of the time. One chilling exception presented itself one day when he spotted three of four little girls huddled over a live shell. First he took the picture, then he alerted authorities.

Not all children in this world are endangered. Walpola caught Carol Bellamy, who was president of the New York City Council in the 1980s, hugging a rehabilitated Tamil rebel boy. At the time Bellamy was executive director of UNICEF.

He finds the human dimensions of war, beyond the spectacle and the fireworks.

“War and Peace in Sri Lanka” also takes viewers into a military hospital, a mental asylum for war widows, and right to the signing of the cease-fire agreement when Sri Lanka’s Gen. Sunil Tennakoon and Tamil leader Krikalan, looking joyful, released white pigeons as symbol of peace.

The St. George Library’s lower-level reference room, where Walpola’s large color prints are hung, isn’t an ideal venue. Naturally, it is lit for reading, not exhibitions, but it is quiet and cool.